Corpus-aided language pedagogy for translator education

The pedagogic uses of language corpora have become a major research area in recent years, following faster and faster technological progress and an ever increasing belief in the role of lexicalisation and memorisation in language performance. For similar reasons, corpora are nowadays also enjoying increasing popularity in translation theory and practice, filling a notorious lack of tools and methods in these areas. At the cross-roads between language pedagogy and translation studies, translator education would seem to be potentially one of the areas to gain most profoundly from corpus use, and indeed a number of researchers so far have testified to the important role of corpora as aids in translation teaching. In this paper I would like to take a different though closely related perspective, and look at the role of corpora in language pedagogy for translator education, rather than translation teaching. My conclusion will be that corpora have an important role to play in the education of translators, first as translating aids, as testified in the literature, secondly as sources of learning activities and of knowledge about the language, and thirdly and more importantly perhaps, as instruments through which approaches to language teaching and to translation teaching can be integrated into a coherent whole, with common aims and methods specific to this pedagogic setting.